Without his notes Epictetus would be little more than a name. Arrian wrote his teacher down, then governed a frontier province and wrote a history of Alexander.
Lucius Flavius Arrianus was a Greek from Nicomedia in Bithynia, on the Asian shore of the Sea of Marmara, from a family that held Roman citizenship. He was born somewhere between AD 85 and 90. As a young man, probably around 108, he spent time in Nicopolis in western Greece, where the former slave Epictetus ran a school. There he did the thing that made him matter more than any other student: he wrote down what was said.
In a short letter to a friend, Lucius Gellius, which now stands at the head of the Discourses, Arrian insists that he did not compose them the way one composes a book. He says he tried to record his teacher's words as closely as he could, in Epictetus's own plain speech, as reminders for himself, and that they reached the public without his knowledge or consent. A Byzantine reader still knew eight books of them; four survive, together with the Handbook, the short selection that became one of the most read Stoic texts of all. How the notes came about is told in the case Arrian and the notes.
The rest of his life went to Roman service. He was consul around 130 and then, for about six years under Hadrian, governor of Cappadocia on the eastern frontier. From there he sent the emperor a report of a voyage of inspection along the coast of the Black Sea, which survives. When the Alans, a horse people from beyond the Caucasus, threatened the province around 135, he marched out with his legions. The historian Cassius Dio writes that the Alans were stopped by fear of Arrian, and part of Arrian's own order of battle for that campaign has come down to us.
In later life he lived in Athens, where he held the chief magistracy in 145 or 146, and wrote history. He modelled himself on Xenophon, the soldier who had written down Socrates, and borrowed Xenophon's title for his own Anabasis of Alexander. Built on the memoirs of two men who had marched with Alexander, it is still the account historians trust most.
His career is well attested, by his own works, by Dio and by inscriptions. His birth year and the date of his stay in Nicopolis are estimates, and nobody knows when he died. How literal the Discourses really are is debated: some scholars hear Arrian's own hand in them, others take his claim at face value. That the voice in them is consistently someone else's, rough and direct, argues for his version.
The notes were his. What became of them was not: they got out without his permission, and that leak is very probably how Epictetus reached Marcus Aurelius, who was given the notes of Epictetus by his teacher Junius Rusticus, and through him everyone since. Arrian did his own part carefully and let the rest go.
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